Tag Archives: nightmares

Since I have several journals on the burner at any given time, I tend to stumble upon things I’ve written sometimes months or even years ago. I’m a bit disorganized with my notebooks. I had chuckle thinking about how I would come across to someone who decided to posthumously recreate my life through my memoirs. I’ll be journaling along and turn the page to come across notes I scribbled years ago. I turned the page yesterday morning to find something I wrote back in April of 2012 that must have been bugging me at the time.

The entry was just a one liner “Fighting Stress is a Contradiction in Terms.” Think about it for a second. Most stress is the result of being stuck in fight or flight mode to begin with. To fight stress just stresses you out more. Much better to let go, take a step back, disengage, and look at the big picture. With my bipolar brain I can easily manufacture stress out of nowhere. Waking up on the wrong side of the bed is familiar to me, especially after a night of weird or bad dreams. Since many of them involve Mr. Husband I’m frequently afraid to share them with him because I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

However I’ve found that if I do trust the Hubman with nightmares as well as my dreams I feel much better afterwards. It’s a huge trust issue for me. I’ve always felt that if you tell people what you’re afraid of it gives them ammunition to scare you at inopportune moments.

The nightmare scenario that happened a few days ago was that Hubman came and told me that his secretary and her husband lost their house somehow. The solution was that we were going to give them our house and move in with his mother. I love my mother-in-law like my own mother. However the same as with my own mother, I sure as hell don’t want to live with her.

In the nightmare I announced that I was not OK with this and declared that I was going to leave. Mr. Hubman snarled “OK fine!” and then took a trash bag, went in my bathroom and started scooping the contents of the medicine cabinet and drawers into said trash bag. Oh, that really pissed me off, and then I woke up, thank God.

I told him about the dream and he laughed. Grrrrr. I demand to be taken seriously, even when I’m acting silly! He told me that when he left for college he knew he was never going back to his parents’ house…ever. He had no desire to live with them again, then or now. I think the thing that upset me most about the dream was that he made a major life decision that affected us both without consulting with me first.

So back to stress. I read somewhere that one of our founding fathers, but I don’t remember which one, I think it was Benjamin Franklin, had a system for handling worry. He would write things he was worried about on a slip of paper and put them in a teapot he kept for that purpose. Then every Wednesday afternoon he would take down the teapot, read the papers and worry then if needed. Usually it was not needed and most of his worries had resolved themselves on their own, or he had distanced himself enough to think of a solution.

I had a wild and wacky dream last night. I think it may have been inspired by listening to the wild and crazy stories my daughter has been telling me lately. If you have not seen previous posts my daughter is mentally ill with bipolar and possibly schizophrenia.

The set up scenario in the dream was that the government had discovered that a huge alien armada of ships was on its way to earth and no one had any idea of their intentions. Was this an invasion or a welcome wagon? No one knew. Of course all of the usual talking heads were speculating wildly as to what was going to happen.

In preparation the government decided to gather a group of people to deal with this problem. I ended up getting drafted because of my skill set. Somehow having previous experience working at a railroad was valuable, something about being a good administrative organizer and being able to arrange transportation for large amounts of people. Maybe I was expected to figure out how many people would fit in a cattle car, who knows? A bunch of us with varying skills were drafted and lodged in a hotel, it was nice hotel, but it was against our will. The hotel was surrounded by armed guards of unidentifiable origin. There were no patches or insignia on their uniform to indicate what branch of the military they were from, if they were military. Maybe they were from some secret militia

Some of the men in the dream were Hugh Laurie, William Shatner, and my old boss Vince Van Horn from the railroad days. For some reason with nothing to do but drink and get silly, they all wanted to hang out with me and get in my pants. I just couldn’t understand it at all. I’m a silver haired 58-year-old married woman and furthermore I was not the slightest bit interested in any of them. I thought those days of men chasing me around the desk were long gone. Furthermore there were more important issues at hand then playing who gets the girl games.

As time passed while we were confined in this hotel, no organized work detail had been worked out yet so everyone spent the majority of their time hitting the sumptuous buffet and drinking like sailors. I kept pocketing and stashing nonperishable food items because I knew the aliens were coming and things were probably going to get a lot worse. The food and the booze were not going to last forever.

At one point during this debauchery Hugh Laurie snuck in my bed, spooned up behind me and tried to get it on. But he was so drunk he had erectile dysfunction. I pretended to be asleep or passed out so he finally gave up and slunk away. It was so incredibly silly that I didn’t intend to mention it and was pretty sure he would not either out of embarrassment over his lack of performance. Somehow later I figured out that he thought I was the lesbian character from the House TV program and he wanted to do the wild thing with a lesbian.

Things proceeded to get even more ridiculous. At one point there were about 15 people in my hotel room drinking and partying, and eating hot dogs. I have no clue where the hot dogs came from or why we were eating them since we could have had rack of lamb, champagne and strawberries delivered to the room on a silver tray by a waiter in full livery. I kept wondering why the hell they wanted to be in my room anyway. I didn’t like any of them particularly and really wanted to talk about what was important, to me anyway, which was the fact that aliens were on their way to earth and what were we going to do about it?

During this drunken revelry a super model teetered her way on six-inch heels, approached me and informed me that I couldn’t have William Shatner because he belonged to her. I told her I didn’t want him anyway and for her to knock herself out. She would be doing me a favor getting him the hell out of my room. I had been considering ripping off his toupee and beating him with it just to shut him up. She didn’t like the answer and proceeded to try to get in a cat fight with me. We wrestled around a bit in the kitchen and I got tired of it and finally grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and tossed her out of the room. It wasn’t that difficult since she was a skinny model and had the upper body strength of a starving kitten.

This nonsense went on for what seemed like days or weeks and finally the aliens showed up. The ship was gigantic, like some 15 miles across and hovered over the city just like in that movie Independence Day, staring Bill Pullman, Will Smith, and Jeff Goldblum. Not believing that the pandemonium could get any worse, it did. Everyone rushed out into the street to see the ship. Some were happy to see it and wanted to invite the aliens to our non-stop party. Others were screaming and running around in a mindless panic.

Then the rain started. The ship began spraying something over the city that looked like some sort of blue goo. People were laughing and dancing in this “rain” and rubbing the stuff all over their skin. I tried to explain to some of them that it was probably not a good idea to rub an unidentified substance sprayed from an alien ship into their skin but nobody paid any attention to me.

I finally threw up my hands and went to the hotel bar, walked behind the counter and grabbed a bottle of booze, I don’t remember what kind. I then found the stairs and descended as far down into the bowels of the hotel as possible and into a farthest dark corner of a sub-basement. I sat down took a huge sip from the bottle and lit a cigarette. As I exhaled I thought “Oh God, this is so going to suck big time.”

Thankfully at this point I woke up. I announced to Mr. Husband that he was lucky he rarely remembers his dreams. These crazy dreams indicate to me that I truly am a writer at heart. I can cook up stuff that makes horror movies seem tame in comparison.

Make note of you dreams. Even when they are nightmares. Sometimes I beat myself up thinking I’m not creative enough. What the hell does that mean anyway? Maybe not creative in the particular way I want to be at a particular moment. If I want to write, instead the brain comes up with a new coat design or a necklace. If I’m knitting, suddenly I want to write a story about mockingbirds gone bad.

I proved myself creative again in a nightmare last night. Mr. Husband was sure that seeing all that gore in that damned movie The Immortals would cause nightmare. He was right, again. I just hate it when that happens. Turns out I can cook up quite a long and involved tale of horror.

The dream last night churned up fears of angry men and a zombie apocalypse. What if the zombie turns out to be your husband? You thought you buried him weeks ago after he died from a plague. Now here he is at your doorstep, pissed off because you buried him. And he wants pay back. Allen Alda played the part of my zombie husband. Why my brain picked him, who knows? My God, I liked Mash, but Allen doesn’t blow my skirt up at all. Not even a little. It’s probably best that it wasn’t the real Mr. Hubby. That is just be too weird.

This dream involved guns, and me missing a target at point-blank range. I only blew the zombie’s arm off. Every one knows that doesn’t kill a zombie, it just makes a mess and slows them down a little. It also featured a crossbow with a rope attached to it. The crossbow just happened to be conveniently on my front porch. Right in between a potted plant and the porch swing. With this I shoot the target (zombie husband) and then hop on a riding lawnmower. I drive round and round the tree securing him to said tree. The logic – I won’t have to shoot a moving target. All this accomplished in PJs, bathrobe and bunny slippers.

The dream ended before I finished the job. I’m glad of that. Just too, too graphic. If I ever turn this into a story, the final scene will me sitting on the porch swing sipping tea from a beautiful porcelain tea-cup. I’ll contemplate whether or not zombies make good fertilizer, and be vaguely annoyed that I have to bury zombie husband again. Seems that asking them to bury themselves is just one to many items on a honey-do list.

Yesterday, Mr. Husband and I went shopping and bought a tent and 2 sleeping bags. On the way home we stopped at the bookstore and bought travel books. Then home, lunch and a good hearty argument for desert that lasted a while. Evidently, we had some festering issues to air out. Washing everything in a gallon or two of tears always works for me.

We eventually became exhausted from this silly endeavor and collapsed in bed, rested for a while and squabbled some more. The upshot of all this is that he “worries” when I’m gone. I’m going to interpret this as he will miss me. I used to view it as him thinking that I can’t be trusted to navigate my way out of a soggy paper bag without some sort of calamity

To cheer ourselves up we went out to dinner just the 2 of us, no grandson. He’s 23 after all and should be able to feed himself on occasion. Our destination – a fabulous seafood restaurant, Vincent’s, here in Big D. It’s where we went on our first date. So romantical. We get a good laugh because we are always the youngest couple there. Youngsters just don’t appreciate good seafood and there is no TV in there. After wards we went to a sports-camping type store and bought a book of road maps.

Unfortunately, right before I went to bed I developed an extreme case of self-doubt and the starting singing the “who do you think you are” blues. It’s a long trip, I will have a melt down. I’m not up to this, what was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking at all. Yada Yada.

All this self talk invaded my dreams and turned it into the nightmare, wild ride, merry-go-round from hell. There were monsters on the ceiling, monsters under the bed, monsters knocking things off my nightstand. I got lost in Tennessee, took a wrong turn, and ended up in Libya. Tarried too long in a greasy spoon and when we came out the truck was up on blocks with all 4 tires gone. In a storm our tent collapsed with us in it, turning us into a burrito that rolled down a hill into a raging stream and we were washed out to sea. Never mind that our tent was 400 miles inland at the time. Anything can happen in a dream.

All of this nonsense exhausted me so much that I ended up sleeping until 10:00 am. That’s really late for me. I’m usually up with the birds.

I realize once again that I am human and just as prone to fears as the next person. I just have to refuse to let them paralyze me and stop me from doing what I dream of doing. Tally Ho!

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About me

I’m a woman of a certain age living and loving in Texas. Can’t get real specific because I’m a work in process. I Like to read sci-fi, steampunk and historical fiction, travel all over the planet, stay home on rainy days, go shopping in the middle of the night, and stay be in bed when I should be doing something.